Analytics is the science of data analysis. Cognitive analytics is the process of analyzing available information or knowledge to create, infer, deduce, or derive new information.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a technique that facilitates exchange of information between humans and data processing systems. For example, one branch of NLP pertains to transforming human readable content into machine usable data. For example, NLP engines are presently usable to accept input content such as a newspaper article or a whitepaper, and produce structured data, such as an outline of the input content, most significant and least significant parts, a subject, a reference, dependencies within the content, and the like, from the given content.
Information about a domain can take many forms, including but not limited to knowledge repositories and ontologies. For example, domain-specific information can take the form of a list of words, phrases, and their equivalents as relate to a product.
Such information can be sourced from any number of data sources. The presenter of the information generally selects the form and content of the information. Before information can be used for NLP, generally, the information has to be transformed into a form that is usable by an NLP engine.
Another branch of NLP pertains to answering questions about a subject matter based on information available about the subject matter domain. This is the branch of cognitive analytics, and is also referred to as a Question and Answer system (Q and A system).
A Q and A system is an artificial intelligence application executing on data processing hardware. A Q and A system answers questions pertaining to a given subject-matter domain presented in natural language.
Typically, a Q and A system is provided access to a collection of domain specific information based on which the Q and A system answers questions pertaining to that domain. For example, a Q and A system accesses a body of knowledge about the domain, where the body of knowledge (knowledgebase) can be organized in a variety of configurations. For example, a knowledgebase of a domain can include structured repository of domain-specific information, such as ontologies, or unstructured data related to the domain, or a collection of natural language documents about the domain.